Tip of the Iceberg episode explored how Facebook targets Palestinian content related to Israel.
Al Jazeera’s Arabic host Tamer Almisshal has had his Facebook profile deleted by Meta 24 hours after the program Tip of the Iceberg aired an investigation into Meta’s censorship of Palestinian content titled The Locked Space.
The program’s investigation, which aired Friday, included admissions from Eric Barbing, former head of Israel’s cybersecurity apparatus, about his organization’s efforts to track Palestinian content using criteria such as “liking” a photo of a Palestinian killed by Israeli forces.
The agency would then approach Facebook and argue that the content should be removed.
According to Barbing, Facebook generally complies with requests and the Israeli security apparatus follows up on matters, including filing lawsuits when necessary.
The investigation followed Barbing’s admissions by interviewing a number of human and digital rights experts, who agreed that there was a clear imbalance in the way Palestinian content is restricted.
The program also interviewed Julie Owono, a member of Facebook’s oversight board, who admitted that there is a discrepancy in the way rules are interpreted and applied to Palestinian content and added that recommendations had been sent to Facebook to correct it.
Al Jazeera asked Facebook why Almisshal’s profile was closed without prior warning or explanation. At the time of publication, she had not received a response.
‘Targeting a journalist’
Almisshal said the deleted profile is his personal page, set up and verified by him in 2006. He had at least 700,000 followers.
“After the huge success of the episode, I discovered that my personal Facebook profile had been deleted without any explanation being given,” he told Al Jazeera. “It really seems like some kind of revenge for the program. We have not yet received a response from Facebook.”
The program’s team wanted to investigate how big the gap was between the way Palestinian and Israeli posts and material are handled by Facebook.
To do that, it set up an experiment where it built two different pages, one with a pro-Palestinian perspective and the other a pro-Israel perspective, and ran tests on them. The team concluded that there was indeed a major discrepancy in the level of control and the way rules are applied to posts on both pages.
A day after Tamer Almisshal, a Palestinian #journalist of #Jazeerapresented shocking evidence of Meta’s censorship of Palestinian content on its platforms during his TV show “Tip of the Iceberg,” Facebook removed his page.#Israeli crimes #Palestine pic.twitter.com/RGQm8sUuzQ
– Hadeel Abo Aita (@aita_hadeel) September 10, 2023
It’s not clear why Facebook would choose to remove an individual’s page in response to a program.
“There was no explanation, no warning,” Almisshal said. “There were previously no problems with the content on my page. No notice that I had broken any rules.”
Almisshal stands by his programme.
“Facebook restricted my account last March, and it has happened before, but usually the situation has been resolved,” he said. “This was a journalistically responsible project and we communicated with Meta so that they could speak during the investigation.
“But to instead target a journalist individually, I never expected that.”